Page 115 - Eclipse of God

88 Chapter 6

accordance with their sense and destiny, men and gods form,
in the final analysis, a single society with a single order, and it
is an order of righteousness. Men may, indeed, seek to evade it,
as not infrequently even the gods of myth do, yet the power of
this order rules over all and ultimately determines the coher-
ence of events. The Rita, which in the world of our perceptions
distinguishes and decides between good and evil, between the
right and the wrong, is a cosmic, but also a metacosmic, ethos
of Being. Thus the gods are addressed in a Vedic hymn: “Your
Rita, which is hidden behind the Rita [the Rita which can be
perceived in empirical life], stands eternally fast, there, where
the horses of the sun are unyoked.” According to an early
Zoroastrian text, the highest god, who created the material
world, is also the father of the effective good disposition, and
of the devotion that does good works. “Heaven and Earth,”
says the Chinese Book of Transformations, the kernel of which
is very old, “move in devotion; hence neither sun nor moon
steps out of its course.” Heraclitus of Ephesus says essentially
the same thing in different form. “The sun shall not step out of
its course; else, the Erinyes, the helpers of Dike, will find him
out.” The avengers of human guilt also watch over the “holy
order of the world.” As a law of the universe it was formulated
even before Heraclitus by Anaximander of Miletos— “All be-
ings must atone and do justice to one another for the wrong
they have done.” And from the school of Confucius we hear,
“He who accepts responsibility before the Tao of heaven and
earth is called a man.” All these sayings complete one another
as if they stood together in one book.

4

The crisis in this doctrine common to the great cultures of the
Orient, including the Greek societies of Asia Minor, broke out